With my new hobby, there came the desire to learn to build and design my own PCB. With that in mind, I began to use the open source ecad solution Kicad. Now I became interested in participating in this project, but, to compile the code you have endure a few challenges - you know, collecting the dependencies,installing them, choose the right branch whiche compiles down and so on. Here I want to show you my experience with that.
First, clone the gitlab repository:
git clone https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad.git git checkout 8.0
Then, you need to install a couple of dependencies I list them in a hopefully complete list
sudo apt-get install cmake libgl-dev libglew-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev ngspice xfonts-scalable libocct-data-exchange-dev libocct-draw-dev libocct-foundation-dev libocct-modeling-algorithms-dev libocct-modeling-data-dev libocct-ocaf-dev libocct-visualization-dev protobuf-compiler libprotobuf-dev swig python3 python3-pip libwxgtk3.0-gtk3-dev unixodbc unixodbc-dev libsecret1
But cmake and wxwidgets both are too old under Debian Bullseye,so you need to install them separately…
For cmake it is straightforward, you clone the repository and build the program from source:
git clone https://github.com/Kitware/CMake.git cd CMake ./bootstrap && make && sudo make install
For wxwidgets its a bit harder, you clone the repository with:
git clone https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets.git git checkout v3.2.4 cd wxWidgets/ git submodule update --init src/jpeg git submodule update --init src/tiff git submodule update --init src/stc/scintilla git submodule update --init 3rdparty/catch git submodule update --init 3rdparty/nanosvg mkdir buildgtk cd buildgtk/ ../configure --with-gtk --prefix=/usr make -j3 sudo make install
Now you are finally ready to build Kicad itself…
git clone https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad.git git checkout 8.0 mkdir -p build/release cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DKICAD_USE_EGL=ON -DKICAD_WAYLAND=OFF ../../ make -j3